The Redwood Coast

Volume 12, Number 4 Review Fall 2010 A Publication of Friends of Coast Community Library in Cooperation with the Independent Coast Observer

Cultural Studies On the Day of the Dead

Hilda Johnston

hildren, I know you have nothing to say. Yet over and over again Cyou’ll be asked to say it. And I’m not asking you to turn your umbrella of silence inside out, the ribs poking into a five-paragraph essay; I am only asking you to write a few sentences. My head is heavy too. It’s the season. We aren’t farmers, yet we know the harvest is over—a few wisps of hay blowing over the bare fields, small birds pecking for grain. Even the dead are uneasy. That’s why we have All Hallows Eve and, in Mexico, The Day of the Dead. But this is not a gloomy holiday, as you can see

by this altar. In Mexico, skeletons ride The Big Fresno Fair bicycles, play the guitar, or dress up to be married. Children eat sugar skulls deco- rated with flowers. For our altar I brought a photograph of my uncle when he was a boy with his The Big Fresno Fair horse, some tomatoes, green peppers and a beer bottle. My Uncle made Jamba- A night out with my mom and Aunt Ella laya—that’s a shrimp dish—with beer, and it’s the custom to put a favorite dish of the dead on the altar. No, they don’t eat Stephen D. Gutierrez it; the aroma is enough. And every altar has marigolds, which, they say, smell like bone and attract the dead. Now you’d was living in Fresno and inviting for fishing and good tequila—and her, of “Ay, Jo, you’re going crazy, I think,” think the dead, being all bone, would long my mom and aunt to visit us when course! she liked to laugh and say. She my aunt said. for something more sensuous and fleshy they could. They came up often, got married and slipped into the life of us, “Maybe, but I know at least I’m in like rose or honeysuckle, but maybe mari- on the train, disembarking at the giving birth to three boys and living in a Fresno!” She sang again. “Fresno! golds are all they can bear. charming station in downtown nice house in San Gabriel. She tagged Fresno! Fresno! LA! LA! LA! What a We also have Indian corn because IFresno. I met them under the quaint tile along with my mom everywhere. They wonderful world we live in! Where are each kernel is a seed. I know it’s not until roof, greeting them on the platform and visited me because they liked Fresno. the Mex’s?” you’re teenagers that many of you will driving them home, my mom calling out, “It’s so, so Fresno here!” my mother “In Tijuana,” my aunt said, laughing. begin to marvel at the properties of seeds, “Yoo-hoo,” waving me down, and my had said the last time they came down, “Shut up now. You’re in Fresno. They’re but at the harvest it is most important to aunt lugging a bag behind her, complain- and looked around. going to deport you.” garner the seeds. If we lose the seeds, we ing all the way. Fruit trees filled my back yard and the “Ay, Eleanor, you’re too much.” lose the thread. See these dry stalks of “Get in the car, Stephen,” my mother problems of the city receded. “Well, you and your Mexicans all the fennel. Each stalk branches into umbels said. “Hay cholos around here.” “Yeah, Jo, so Fresno,” my aunt re- time. I get sick of hearing you. Relax and of licorice-flavored seeds. “Ay, don’t be so prejudiced,” my aunt minded her. “You just like to come for enjoy Fresno.” You can come up to the altar when said. “It’s just like home, LA.” the ride.” She was the sane one. She nudged me you’ve chosen your skeleton. Remember, “It is, isn’t it?” I had stopped at a red “I love it here, love it!” all the time with her hip rectitude. each of you is the skeleton of someone light in front of a taquería. Plenty more “Well, I like it, too,” my aunt said. “All right, we’re here!” I drove us up who has died. You can pick someone you ran beside it. Brown buildings blended “But I’m not in love with it. It’s a nice into the driveway. My wife Jackie came knew personally or someone from history. into the landscape. In LA, the working city to visit, sure, and see you guys. But out and helped with the bags. Yes, you can be a horse . . . or, yes, a poor toiled in factories, not fields. Other- it’s not the greatest city in the world, I “Oh, Jackie, you look so good in that dinosaur. I imagine you are more familiar wise, the two cities shared a lot. I liked don’t think, yet.” blouse. Is that the one Carmen gave with dinosaur skeletons than with the them both. They remained places where “Close,” my mom said, “to LA.” you?” Carmen, the other aunt with the lumbering beasts themselves. At least we lower-middle-class Mexicans, like us, “To your LA, maybe,” my aunt said, weird taste, picked a winner for once. were in my day. could feel good. “not mine. I can barely breathe anymore.” “Yeah, I like it a lot.” Whatever skeleton you choose, you “Americans,” my mother reminded me, “Better to breathe LA smog than “It looks really good on you, Jackie. should write about what your skeleton taking it in. “Mira nomás, look at how Fresno air,” my mom sang out. “LA! Let’s get this stuff in the house and eat, remembers. The dinosaur must miss the Mexican it is.” LA! LA!” I’m starving.” Aunt Ella wasn’t shy dur- ferny marshes of the Mesozoic. But the But my aunt checked her. “See, Jo, it’s ing those trips. Nobody was. “What shall horse has a harder time of it. His fields Mexican this, Mexican that. But every- I like fairs, the sights we have for dinner? Mexican?” are still here, a blue-red in the autumn where you go, you want to see where the “Whatever.” sunset. The horse is like the girl who dies Mexicans live.” and sounds, the ex- in Our Town—that’s a play. She comes “It’s true. I love my people,” she said, citement of it all. I ustle in the kitchen produced a good back, invisibly, and watches life going staring out the window. “But they’re so Bdinner, with coffee and dessert, and on without her. She misses everything. poor. I feel sorry for them.” like the rides whirring then a good time spent lying around fol- Yes, even homework—her pencils and “Don’t be so condescending,” I said. lowed. We sat in the living room talking, her copybooks. Death turns everything “We’re no better.” around me, and the burping, loosening our belts; unbuttoning upside down. That’s why we invite the Then she agreed. “We’re not, are we? our waistbands. “Excuse me, that was dead back, not just to give them a day off, Just poor Mexicans, too.” people relaxing for gross.” though god knows they deserve it, but to My aunt said nothing. She was the a bit, and the games “You’re excused, dearie. Ay, diós mío, clear our own heavy heads. It’s as though younger one: the rebel who had been a what was that?” all summer we’ve been squirreling away “career girl” into her late twenties, daring promising a small hap- “That’s the Fresno bugs slapping nuts and seeds and now we can’t remem- the barrio to call her an old maid, working against the window screen.” ber where we’ve stored half of them, and as a secretary for a corporation and saving piness. I enjoyed my- “I’m really in the country, ain’t I?” anyway we have more than we need and enough money to travel. She conquered self, walking around “Not really. You’re a good five miles we’d really like to go to sleep, but first Mexico with Capri pants that stirred the from any field.” we have to make sure we can get through natives. She dropped in on Hawaii and with my aunt and mom, “They don’t have fields anymore in the winter, and that’s why we save these broke some hearts. Fresno?” seeds. And why we welcome the dead. “They asked me to dance all night, Ben flinging his arms “They do, outside the city. It’s not the Now I want each of you to imagine what those guys! But Bev got drunk and we out in the stroller, same.” your skeleton would miss should he come had to cut it short! Crazy Bev!” “What do they have now?” back to visit. Soon she met him, Uncle Eddie, a wide-eyed and amazed. tejano with a booming laugh and a love See DEAD page 10 See fair page 10 Page  The Redwood Coast Review Fall 2010 editor’s note George Hitchcock, Jorge-of-all-trades

Stephen Kessler

hen I was an undergradu- a labor organizer, a gardener, an ate and aspiring poet at actor, a playwright, an inves- school in upstate New He was an influen- tor (municipal bonds, he once York in the mid-1960s I counseled me, were the best started reading the small- tial teacher, more by place to put your money), a poet, Wcirculation independent literary journals someone you couldn’t easily pin example than direct known as little magazines. It was a volatile down with a limiting defini- historical moment when cultural life was instruction, to many tion. After the earthquake of starting to erupt in all sorts of unpredict- 1989 he and Marjorie left Santa able forms, and one of those forms was this other writers and edi- Cruz and returned to his native suddenly dynamic proliferation of creative tors, including this one, Oregon, where he continued with periodicals run by eccentric individuals with his various activities, spending a taste for poetry and some esthetic agenda and a legendary figure winters in La Paz, at the tip of or political viewpoint to promulgate, and Baja, where George, as “Jorge read by a self-selected bohemian elite. One in the literary culture Hitchcock,” frequently showed such journal was the San Francisco quar- of the sixties through his whimsical, surrealish, sophis- terly kayak, a remarkably lively magazine ticated, mordant, quasi-primitive launched in 1964 and publishing some of the eighties, without paintings and collages in local the best poets, both famed and unknown, galleries. then writing in the United States. The editor ever making a specta- and publisher of kayak was someone named cle of himself or try- eorge Hitchcock died at his George Hitchcock. Ghome in Eugene on the night Like pretty much every other anti-Es- ing to play the role of of August 27. He was 96 years tablishment poet in the country, I wanted old and had lived an extraordi- to be in kayak, so I started submitting my anyone’s guru. narily creative and fully realized poems—and promptly receiving them back life. He was an influential along with shockingly irreverent rejection teacher, more by example than year to teach writing and theater at UCSC’s slips with deadpan regrets from the editor George Hitchcock, 1914-2010 direct instruction, to many other accompanied by a comical collage or il- new College V, whose academic theme was writers and editors, including this lustration clipped from some 19th-century to be the arts. While continuing to collect one, and a legendary figure in picture book featuring a man falling into a rejections from kayak I gradually, in the the literary culture of the sixties hole or being devoured by wolves or shot by course of occasional encounters, began to through the eighties—a model a firing squad or suffering some other unfor- get to know its humorously grumpy editor. of independence, ethics and tunate fate. These rejections, in addition to Near the end of my career in grad school, integrity—without ever making being amazingly quick and thus sparing you before flipping out and dropping out, I took a spectacle of himself or trying the agony of suspense, had a lighthearted George’s poetry workshop, and when the to play the role of anyone’s guru. “tough luck” in the subtext—none of those term was over he invited me to serve as his He didn’t like to be the center of “we-found-much-to-admire-in-your-work- teaching assistant next quarter in impro- attention but enjoyed providing but-due-to-the-large-volume-of-submissions visational acting. This seemed to me very a setting for others to interact . . . and-good-luck-placing-it-elsewhere” strange, as I had zero experience in theater, and flourish. kayak was both a notes more typical of today’s creative-writ- but evidently the teacher detected something highly individual vehicle, a “one- ing-program-based reviews. No niceness in my poems or personality that he thought man boat” piloted by the editor’s or phony encouragement tainted kayak’s would enable me to improvise the role of singular vision, and a commu- forthright rejections with insincerity. his TA. nity effort created at his famous When I returned to California for gradu- Instead I continued my graduate studies Sunday get-togethers. ate school at UC Santa Cruz in 1968 I met in various madhouses up and down the At a time when the academic George Hitchcock at a small gathering at the state, returning to Santa Cruz the follow- formalist model was fading as home of poet Morton Marcus, who had also ing year unsure whether to resume pursuit a viable style for contemporary moved there that year to teach at Cabrillo of the PhD or take a leap into the unknown poetry, and the New York School

and try to be a writer. One night George’s ck College. As destiny would have it, Hitch- o and Black Mountain poets and cock moved to Santa Cruz the following friend Kenneth Rexroth was giving a read- the Beat movement were on the ing on campus and I happened to run into rise, George took kayak in its

George on the way to the hall. I told him own unique direction, cultivat-

c h tc i H I was thinking about going back to gradu- Jorge ing an imagistic, surrealist, he edwood oast T R C ate school but wasn’t sure if I should. He non-doctrinaire, irreverent, often asked, “Do you need the money?” I had a the issue would be assembled by his crew of political, sometimes polemical sensibility, fellowship but also some family income, helpers, whom he and his partner, Marjorie and publishing a range of poets from W. Review enough to live on. “Not really,” I answered. Simon, would supply with platters of cold S. Merwin and Raymond Carver and Anne He said, “Don’t do it.” cuts and plenty of beverages. It made for Sexton to Robert Bly and Gary Snyder and Stephen Kessler It was the best advice I ever received. Philip Levine, as well as many lesser-known Editor delightful social life—many good friend- In those days before the MFA industry ships and collegial acquaintances were bards like me. The magazine also printed and Garrison Keillor made poetry a respect- Barbara L. Baer initiated—and efficiently accomplished letters and George’s collage illustrations— able occupation, to decide you wanted to be the mission of putting out the magazine. always provocative and amusing—and had Daniel Barth a poet was not a plausible career move. You Daniela Hurezanu George was the director of this operation, a section for criticism where I published my were dooming yourself to a life at the edge Jonah Raskin positioning people on the assembly line and first book reviews. It was easily one of the Contributing Editors of everything, with neither a guaranteed instructing them on procedures (if this was most vital publications of that or any era in income nor any sign of societal acceptance. their first time) but otherwise assuming as American poetry. Linda Bennett Hitchcock, with his own anti-academic low a profile as his leonine 6-foot-4 phy- But his post-kayak years were at least Production Director history and a brief career in progress as sique would allow. He ran things in a way as fertile, with a prolific output of art and an accidental professor, apparently had that enabled his helpers to run themselves. a continuing creative evolution as an all- The Redwood Coast Review is published concluded that, at least for someone like His poetry workshops worked much the around man of culture who proceeded on quarterly (January, April, July and October) me, unemployability was a better bet than same way. George rarely commented on his own path while also encouraging oth- by Friends of Coast Community Library in professorhood. students’ writing, rather allowing partici- ers—for example, endowing a poetry fund cooperation with the Independent Coast pants to read and remark on one another’s at UCSC for nurturing the art and its writers Observer. The opinions expressed in these ventually my poems made it into the pages are those of the individual writers and efforts. He didn’t assert authority or try to through readings and other programs. Epages of kayak, and in 1975 George push the poets in one direction or another, His personal style, in the years I knew do not necessarily reflect the views of FoCCL, published my first book. The kayak imprint the ICO or the advertisers. Contents copyright instead just listening attentively, some- him, tended to tweed jackets, sometimes a was a great endorsement, and though the © 2010 The Redwood Coast Review. All rights times making a brief comment, or starting cape, paisley ascots, rakish hats (often with revert to authors and artists on publication. book received mixed reviews, it did get an exercise with some object he would a feather in the hatband), a pipe, a walking We welcome your submissions. Please reviewed, and at the premature age of 28 I pass around the room—in his apartment at stick—a somewhat Oscar Wildean figure of send essays, reviews, fiction, poetry and letters was launched as an author. Hitchcock, in College V in the workshop I took with him anachronistic fashion—and a resonant tenor to the Editor, The Redwood Coast Review, c/o ICO, his gruff and subtle way, had given my so- in 1969, later in his living room in Bonny voice that bespoke his stage experience. PO Box 1200, Gualala, CA 95445. Manuscripts called career a supportive shove. I wasn’t Doon or in the big Victorian on Ocean View He liked to dress up in a scary costume on should be typed, double-spaced, with the the only poet, young or mature, for whom author’s name, address, phone and email at in Santa Cruz—and turning the writers loose Halloween and give the trick-or-treaters George had played such a role. Over the to riff associatively, giving free rein to their the fright of their night. The Day of the the top of the first page. Postal mail only. A next several years I would meet many of self-addressed, stamped envelope is required imaginations. Dead, with its dancing skeletons and festive for our reply. them in the community that grew out of It was imagination that he valued above celebrations of the departed, was a holiday On the Web: stephenkessler.com/rcr.html kayak, both in its pages and in the legendary all—not autobiography or sentiment or ideas suited to his darkly comic temperament. Subscription information: See page 9. collating parties where the magazine was or noble thoughts or “spirituality”—but a He hitched his kayak to a star and blazed Friends of Coast Community Library is a physically put together. sense of invention, discovery, astonishment a long bright streak across the sky. nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization. Three or four times a year, on a Sunday and wit. In criticism, intellectual honesty Tax-deductible donations may be sent to afternoon, dozens of poets and friends of was paramount. kayak ran from 1964 to Coast Community Library, PO Box 808, Point kayak would gather at George’s house in Arena, CA 95468. The library is located at 1984, a total of 64 issues, and that was that. Santa Cruz to collate, staple, stuff, stamp George, as self-described “dictator” of the Stephen Kessler is the editor and principal 225 Main Street in Point Arena. Telephone and send out the latest issue. George—a 707.882.3114. enterprise, was ready to move on to other translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Thank you for your support! skilled printer, among his other crafts and things—more of his own writing, visual Borges (Penguin). An earlier version of this arts—by then had printed the pages himself art, teaching, acting, directing, traveling. essay appeared online at news.santacruz. on a press in the shop on his property, and He’d been a merchant seaman, a journalist, com. Fall 2010 The Redwood Coast Review Page  books An Inconvenient Man

Rebecca Taksel

Hitch-22: A Memoir the base, hysterical lie that all Jews had left the World Trade sentence, Hitchens concludes, “The second so-called Pales- by Christopher Hitchens Center just in time to avoid the airstrike.” Oliver Stone, tinian intifadah, organized or incited in response to one of Twelve (2010), 435 pages and the ‘Reverends’ (his quotation marks) Falwell and Ariel Sharon’s staged provocations at the Al Aqsa mosque, Robertson are ridiculed for portraying the terrible events as, reeked to me of racist and religious demagogy and of that hristopher Hitchens’s Hitch-22: A Memoir respectively, an anti-globalization uprising and a merited dull, sinister, ‘sacrificial’ incantation that has since become opens with a quotation from George Orwell. punishment for American’s tolerance of sexual deviance. so nauseating on a world scale.” Hitchens’s sympathy with Orwell is profound “Next up was my magazine, The Nation, whose publish- Hitchens himself is not a Zionist, because he regards and personal. The two are from the same stra- ing wing cashed in with a hastily translated version of a antisemitism as one “ineradicable” element of “the toxin tum of the British middle class, for one thing. deranged best-seller, alleging that the Pentagon had not been with which religion has infected us.” He sympathizes with CHitchens writes that in his youth he “hadn’t quite appreci- hit with a civilian plane carrying my friend Barbara, but European friends who tell him they are “prepared for the day ated that actual fiction could be written about morose, proud, rather by a cruise missile fired by the Bush administration.” when it happens again.” After all, how could devout Chris- but self-pitying people like us, and was powerfully struck by That little phrase, “my friend Barbara,” is Hitchens at his tians and Muslims ever forgive the Jews for having “seen the manner in which Orwell mimicked and ‘caught’ the tone. best. This is the Hitchens who writes so feelingly about his through Jesus and Mohammed?” He congratulates the Jews If he was reliable on essentials like this, I reasoned, I could friend Salman Rushdie’s terrifying ordeal upon the publica- for that: “May this always be the case, whenever any human trust him on other subjects as well.” tion in 1989 of The Satanic Verses. Asked by The Wash- primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.” The “essentials” for Hitchens are the essentials of the ington Post to comment on the Ayatollah’s fatwah against Hitchens is particularly poignant when he writes about writer: catching the tone, getting the details right, choosing Rushdie, Hitchens says, “It was . . . a matter of everything I his mother’s Jewishness, of which he was unaware until after exactly the right words in the right combination, as Hitch- hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dicta- her death, and which he embraces. He finds that he can live ens does with “morose, proud but self-pitying.” Hitchens’s torship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying happily with the apparent contradiction of the Jewish atheist, manual of style must certainly be Orwell’s brilliant, and and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, and he identifies the cosmopolitanism of so many Jews, their unfortunately entirely prescient, 1946 essay, “Politics and humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.” involvement in struggles for other people, as, yes, Jewish! It the English Language,” which exposed the developing art of He adds, “Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to is typical of Hitchens that the discovery of his Jewish roots using euphemism to hide the commercial, bureaucratic, and was the occasion for a journey, in this case to Poland. political agendas for which words like “cheat” and “lie” and Hitch-22 was given the full publicity treatment by its “murder” might be inconvenient. One of the joys of reading Hitchens simply refused to publisher, and Hitchens made the rounds of the talk shows, Hitchens is discovering his zeal to use just such words. He reason backwards from cherished being his usual articulate and often obnoxious self. What no is almost Homeric in his epithets, with “the homicidal con- doubt occasioned the heavy promotion of the memoir is the tras ” and “ the mythical, primitive, and cruel Abraham and and polite truths. He refused to surprising success of his 2008 book, God Is Not Great. This Moses” replacing wily Odysseus and rosy-fingered Dawn. full-out attack on religion surely should have shattered any There may well be pockets of the left even now where it write the sort of didactic prose idea that Hitchens was willing to be the darling of Ameri- is inconvenient to be a fan of Orwell. As late as the 1990s a can rightists. Nor, for that matter, did the multiculturalist flurry of letters to the editor might still be got up in maga- beloved of left-wing ideologues. leftists give it the stamp of approval. And yet it sold, and zines like The Nation about the exact nature and the exact He refused, above all, to accept sold, because it was wonderfully and outrageously refresh- timing of Orwell’s betrayal of the international proletariat ing. Hitchens simply refused to reason backwards from as represented by Joseph Stalin. Hitchens, formerly a writer the split between what a religion cherished and polite truths. He refused to write the sort of for The Nation, has certainly proved inconvenient to the left didactic prose beloved of left-wing ideologues who sound in the US and the UK because of his support for the invasion purports to be and what its prac- just like the moms and dads in the supermarkets engaging in of Iraq. For some, that is sufficient cause to dismiss him as titioners actually do. painstaking, faux-egalitarian dialogue with their toddlers. another turncoat neoconservative. Hitchens maintains that He refused, above all, to accept the split between what a he did not “repudiate a former loyalty, like some attention- religion purports to be and what its practitioners actually do. grabbing defection,” but simply felt that loyalty “falling In other words, he reported, away from me.” vividly, in unvarnished It didn’t have far to fall. There was the inconvenient phrases and exact words, matter of his earlier support for intervention in Bosnia. It which is what he has always was over the Balkans conflict that Hitchens broke with done. God Is Not Great is Noam Chomsky, calling him out for conflating Serbia with honest, sharp, and hilarious- “Yugoslavia” and maintaining that “the old spirit of the ly funny. No one has drawn Yogoslav socialist ‘partisans’ was much more to be found in blood on religious topics the anti-fascist posters and slogans of the Bosnian resistance like this since Lenny Bruce. than in the fiery yet lugubrious, defiant yet self-pitying, race- and-blood obsessed effusions of the Serbs, ‘socialist’ though ood writers don’t tend their nominal leader Slobodan Milosevic might claim to be.” Gto be good ideologues, Once again, Hitchens insists upon the actual words and as many of them have found deeds of the Serbs and Bosnians, and he does so from first- out over the centuries, often hand knowledge. He went to Sarajevo, and he was in physi- to the detriment of their cal danger there; he read those posters on the walls of build- health and safety. And ings in the war-torn city. His advocacy of the overthrow of Hitchens is a writer, com- Saddam Hussein was similarly informed by his experiences fortable with writers. His in Iraq and his sympathy with the Kurds. Those experiences best friends, notably Martin left him with a visceral hatred for Saddam, one based on Amis and Clive James, are facts that made Hitchens scathingly dismissive of attempts to literary men, not political paint Saddam as, for example, any kind of “secularist.” pundits. Besides the numer- Anyone on the right who seeks to read Hitch-22 as a ous references to Orwell in neocon apologia will find the book and its author even more Hitch-22, there are at least inconvenient. It is true that he sees no current viable gov- twenty to W. H. Auden and a ernments on the left, only populist, nationalist regimes like dozen to Evelyn Waugh. If that of Chávez in Venezuela, which he finds “repellent.” But Hitchens has chosen to write his reckoning is with everyone, not least himself. Christopher Hitchens essays and polemics rather For one thing, Hitchens does not make facile and sim- than fiction or poetry, he has plistic comparisons between “left” and “right,” communism think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn’t nevertheless brought all of himself, his feelings as well as and fascism, reminding himself instead that no fascist ever known Salman at all.” his reasoning power, to his writing. Hitch-22 begins with went through the soul-searching that Soviet-era communists The fatwah was a litmus test for friends, colleagues, and several chapters of autobiography, filled with emotionally did, wringing their hands and exclaiming, “How could such enemies. Hitchens criticized the neoconservatives who, honest passages about his parents, his schooling, his youth- frightful crimes be committed in the name of Nazism?” or while vehemently anti-“terrorist,” relished the fact that this ful bisexuality, his ardent leftist organizing. The book then “Hitler has betrayed the revolution!” “radical Indian friend of Nicaragua and the Palestinians” branches out into essays both personal and political, and the had become a victim of terrorism. Besides, they seemed to tone throughout is essentially the same: for Hitchens, the itchens is also scrupulously fair in his comments about have forgotten the dealings of their beloved Reagan with political and the personal really are connected, in all sorts of Hformer friends and co-thinkers with whom he parted the Ayatollah in the Iran-contra matter. On the other side unexpected ways. company over one issue or another, notably Chomsky and were the Marxists who “in their multicultural zeal” por- Another poet who merits several mentions in Hitch-22 Edward Said. His admiration for Susan Sontag, of whom he trayed Rushdie’s book as racist. Hitchens accuses them of is Philip Larkin, whose poetry Hitchens fell in love with in paints a lively, nuanced, and affectionate picture, is not di- “a wilful, crass confusion between religious faith, which is his youth. His admiration for Larkin was very inconvenient minished by her failure to have embraced him unreservedly. voluntary, and ethnicity, which is not.” indeed for the young left-winger. Having found out that Most important, he is hardly uncritical of the people to On matters of religion, Hitchens is spectacularly inconve- Larkin hated just about everything Hitchens embraced—the whom his erstwhile leftist colleagues want to abandon him. nient, again all across the political spectrum. He refuses to left, striking workers, foreigners, even London—the young About the war in Iraq, he says, “I probably now know more go along with the prevailing left-wing antisemitism which man concluded that “you couldn’t have everything.” If about the impeachable incompetence of the Bush administra- identifies Israel as the greatest human-rights violator on the readers of Hitch-22 are willing to abandon the comfort and tion than do many of those who would have left Iraq in the planet while making excuses for all sorts of Arab terror- self-satisfaction of ideological purity for a few hours, they hands of Saddam.” Writing about the immediate aftermath ism and hate speech. His friendship with Edward Said was will certainly come to a similar conclusion. With Hitchens, of 9/11, he remembers that “President Bush (who had run tested and finally broken as Said gradually revealed his you may not have everything, but you will have a very great away and disappeared on the day itself) did his best to mud- disingenuousness. Said could agree with Hitchens that Yas- deal. dy the waters by saying that it was a matter of ‘Amurrka’ ser Arafat was “a thug and a practitioner of corruption and versus ‘the terrists’ . . . and didn’t appear to acknowledge, extortion” only to the extent that he aligned himself with or even to know about, the huge number of non-American America by appearing on the White House lawn with Clin- citizens who had perished . . .” ton and Yitzhak Rabin. Arafat “had no right to sign away Rebecca Taksel, a regular contributor, lives and teaches in Hitchens on 9/11 is nothing if not evenhanded, which in land,” Said maintained. Hitchens comments, “Really? Pittsburgh. Hitch-22 and all the other books reviewed in his case is all about spreading the guilt and folly equally: . . . How could two states come into being without mutual this issue are available through Coast Community Library. “Within a few days, the Muslim world had been infected by concessions on territory?” In a pox-on-both-their-houses Page  The Redwood Coast Review Fall 2010 writers & writing Writing Under the Influence Carolyn Cooke

ohn Updike taught me every- Once during a visit I came downstairs into idealism, which he despises as clubby and thing I knew about sex before the The taunt of an early the dining room to find Nana and my grand- elitist, and which he rebels against by vot- seventh grade. A desolate January father sitting at opposite ends of the French- ing for Nixon. The scene culminates as he evening in 1972, an island off the critic—that Updike polished mahogany table, tucking into their masturbates his wife’s best friend through coast of Maine, the usual frigid cereal. Their silver spoons ticked against her ski pants in the backseat of a car while Jdarkness already fallen over town: I’m sit- writes beautifully but the chipped Deruta bowls which Nana his lefty wife (the precise incarnation of half ting in a Windsor chair in the Jesup Memo- has nothing to say— would, after breakfast, rinse and tuck into his readers) natters on about liberal politics. rial Library reading Couples, my hair still the dishwasher and which Gr. would remove After the episode, Updike feels free of cer- wet from swim team practice at the YMCA seems to me beside the again before lunch, wipe, unwashed, and tain easy allegiances, solitary and redeemed. next door. The librarian calls my mother at put away. (He had no use for any technol- S. thought such scenes from Miller and home. Carolyn is reading adult materials, point. The point of nov- ogy but the radio that brought him the Red Updike must offend me “as a woman,” filthy books. Should she put a stop to it? I els is not information Sox and the monaural turntable on which he imagining, I suppose, that I would identify remember only being unwilling to leave the played his old Mabel Mercer records.) They with the prostitute or the wife as opposed book, the chair, the library, to return from but atmosphere; atmo- sat across from each other in a deep silence to the central character, the alter-Miller or the ineffable almost erogenous zone where of their own. Around them the air trembled Updike, whose sensibility lives at the center reading (and especially Updike) took me. sphere is how the novel with the high-pitched screech of the smoke of the scene. There’s no such thing, really, Updike’s kind of realist fiction—besot- detector, which had gone off over some siz- as a “realist novel” or a “female reader”—or ted with the junk material of America, “says.” zling bacon. there ought not to be. Like most “African- the ugliness rendered gorgeous but also They’re both dead now. Nana cleaned up American poets,” or “Southern Gothic” fic- recognizable—formed a perfect objective the novel “says,” and Updike’s atmosphere after herself—left nothing personal, no sur- tion writers, or, say, transgender memoirists correlative for the kind of life-energy and is everywhere on his pages, as if testoster- prise stash of love letters bound in ribbons, of Lebanese extraction, I’d prefer to read freedom I yearned for, qualities I associated one were his ink.) no diary. I’m the executrix (his word) of my and write freely, unencumbered by limiting with literature, which I associated with men. In “The Disposable Rocket” Updike grandfather’s literary effects, which consist adjectives. I don’t remember reading women before quotes Byron in Don Juan, comparing the largely of multiple copies of his verses Roth and Updike always seemed to me college, when a professor turned me onto daily burden of shaving to the trouble of and lighter fare—poignant purple pages, like false opposites, two sides of one coin, Joan Didion. Her sexless prose, her chilly, childbirth—an old joke. This sense of men’s mimeographed and stapled, held together set up as binaries to thwart the opposition neurotic habits of mind, her perfect pitch, entitlement to degrade women’s experi- by rubber bands. One volume is called “Hid —women, people of color, working class opened worlds to me. But it was almost too ence while simultaneously demanding their Heart on Sleeve”; another, “Elbow Patches.” people who bang at the gates—echoing the late. I was like a dog tied up out back on approval reminds me, rather fondly, of my They form a peculiar oeuvre for a man similar false opposites of F. Scott Fitzgerald a chain for years before being brought into grandfather, who used to regale his wife, who could recite most of Edwin Arlington and Ernest Hemingway. (F: “The rich are the family fold. Once in the door, I had bad my Nana, at breakfast with his light verse. Robinson and Emily Dickinson and much of different from you and me.” H: “Yes, they habits—chewed, yipped. Before Didion, my Here’s an example: Shakespeare by heart, and I cannot stand to have more money.”) reading for pleasure (by which I mean self- Let’s weigh the burdens dealt each sex – read them. While S. and I wasted our evenings recognition and self-invention) was all E. B. The ‘Who fares worse?’ which us per- Once I loaded the whole stash into a box arguing about whether Roth or Updike had White, John Cheever, J. D. Salinger, Joseph plex; to take to the recycling center—and then produced the more quintessential American Mitchell, Henry Miller, John O’Hara, James Who has the harder earthly fate, drove around for a year before I put the novel, nailed it—Roth and Updike were Baldwin, Theodore Dreiser, Richard Yates, The husband or his sleek-cheeked mate? box back in my office with the rest of his essentially conversing amiably with each Richard Wright, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Agreed, the lady has to bear artifacts—his letters, his articles in the In- other, sparring and feinting, as if, in the end, Philip Roth and, of course, Updike. The borning of the son and heir, dependent School Bulletin, his six hundred the American novel belonged to one mater- These spiritual fathers—heroes and Nine months of cumbersome expansion watercolors. nally smothered, privileged, precocious, het- enemies—ruined me early. They’re old or Before son enters earthly mansion; erosexually hyperactive male imagination dead now; Salinger went this January—Up- That’s brief and ends in joyous cry. poet friend, S., and I used to debate or the other, as if the question were whether dike, almost exactly a year before. How ‘How cute the cuddly little guy!’ A whether Roth or Updike was the better authentic American experience was more I miss the effete, prolific, claustrophobic, True, that is the woman’s cross to bear. writer. (S. preferred Roth for being Jewish WASP-ish or Jewish. (Updike, born humbly asthmatic, stuttering, psoriatic Updike! Re- But wait: she has no facial hair. and presumably earthier, and always re- in Pennsylvania Dutch country, was not a reading recently “The Disposable Rocket,” Our job was to witness him, to laugh ferred to the other as John Fucking Updike traditional WASP, and did not feel him- a bold essay reasserting old saws about with him, to admire him—but also to accede as a comment on his almost mechanical rate self to be one, though he came early on to the differences between men and women to the force of his arguments, to follow his of production.) We argued; once S. threw embody that animal in speech and manner.) —biology, destiny, the familiar trajectory own example and not take ourselves too se- me out of his house when I compared Up- He twice channeled a fictional Roth: Bech: of heterosexuality—made me cringe with riously. To parse the poem at all was to ruin dike to Henry Miller (both Lutheran-bred, A Book and Bech is Back—but the truth is familiar irritation and envy. There’s nothing it, to betray a mean-spirited, man-bashing obsessed by and sparklingly articulate about that neither Updike nor Roth has written in “The Disposable Rocket” I haven’t heard feminism. To be silent was to urge him on the gritty materials of sex). S. worshipped completely convincingly about anyone but before—the entitlement, the argument that in his production of couplets, croakers (“I’m Roth, and also Henry Miller and Bukowski versions of themselves. Updike’s Rabbit takes its conclusion for granted at the outset, dying, he croaked”), limericks, illustrated and dared me, really, to take offense at pas- Angstrom is a kind of exception, but only in the witty euphemisms that polished New clichés, his annual Christmas poem, light sages like the one in which Miller compares that he’s downmarket middle class—a car Englanders use to lubricate direct and blunt productions that in fact meant so much to late-night intercourse with a prostitute to salesman. Otherwise, he’s just like Updike: speech and which Updike permits himself him—an unstoppable flow of modest liter- sex with “a milkshake.” morally naïve, oppressed by domestic re- with such impertinences as: “From the ary ambition. The stuff ran freely through Updike is no less crude than Miller, in sponsibilities, free and at home on the range standpoint of reproduction, the male body is him, like chlorinated water from a tap: his way. In the mid-section of his memoir of America. Roth never really gets into the a delivery system, and the female is a mazy almost benign, almost wholesome. Self-Consciousness, he describes in the most mind of The Breast of that eponymous book device for retention. Once the delivery is He produced and recited daily for so long provoking terms possible his contempt for or into the woman at the center of the awful made, men feel a faint but distinct fall- that Nana stopped listening until finally, in his wife’s and all his literary friends’ anti- sequel, The Dying Animal; it’s always been ing-off of interest. Yet against the enduring her nineties, she stopped hearing entirely. Vietnam-war activity and antigovernment hard for him to get into the mind of anyone heroics of birth and nurture should be set who has much of a bosom. His best, most the male’s superhuman frenzy to deliver his brilliant creation is Philip Roth, or versions goods: he vaults walls, skips sleep, risks of Roth, in early, hilarious caricatures such wallet, health, and his political future all to as Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Com- ram home his seed into the gut of the chosen plaint through the brilliant self-indulgences woman.” of the Zuckerman novels to the ambitious, The delicate through-line of woman- competitive social novels, such as American revulsion famously runs through Updike Pastoral and I Married a Communist. The like a red line through a poisoned finger: Roth vs. Updike argument is really about The woman is a “mazy device”; bear- sensibility. It’s about the tone in which ing children are “enduring heroics”; the American men of a certain generation literal upshot of human sexuality is rammed seduce their women and live their lives; it’s “home” in the woman’s “gut.” about the color of their conscience, and how Psychosexually, Updike is all bad news. they strive. But because none of the women in Updike are real, our empathy remains with the was ruined early by reading, hardened hero, the alter-author. When I say “we” I into a certain shape that was finally, I don’t mean that we all empathize with seismically shocked and broken open by Updike, only that the books are structured Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Grace this way. In the opening scenes of Memoirs Paley, Jean Rhys, Alice Munro, Elizabeth of the Ford Administration, the Updike- Hardwick, Elizabeth Bishop, Susan Sontag, like narrator takes a break from writing Cynthia Ozick, bell hooks, Lydia Davis, his book about Buchanan to have sex with Judith Butler, and Mary Gaitskill, all writers his mistress. Here he is after the ecstasy who gave me my first ideas about what it and the denouement: “I itched to buck, to might mean to write about matters of the toss off this itchy incubus moistly riding world, to write the kind of book I hadn’t my back . . . I should be correcting term read yet. But it was Updike who taught me papers or working at my book, my precious first in the Jesup reading room as I bent my nagging hopeless book.” It’s beautiful chlorinated head over those pornographi- —Updike’s great gift—this soulful cruelty, cally thrilling, anxiety-riddled and woman- this perfect existential freedom (maybe even fearing pages, You can say anything. There compulsion) within formal discourse to say is nothing you can’t say. absolutely anything, well. (The taunt of an early critic—that Updike writes beautifully but has nothing to say—seems to me beside Carolyn Cooke’s novel, Daughters of the the point. The point of novels is not infor- Revolution, is forthcoming from Knopf. mation but atmosphere; atmosphere is how John Updike Fall 2010 The Redwood Coast Review Page  memoir The Distance Between Us By Julian Hoffman

“I have kept asking myself . . . what the invisible connections that determine our lives are, and how the threads run.” —W. G. Sebald

ow and then I see him again, though I never know precisely when the mo- ment might be. He has a tendency to arrive unannounced. For nearly fifteen years our relationship has existed this way, fugitive and unreliable. But it re- mains charged with such significance that I’m willing to forgive its frustrations. We rendezvous Non his terms, not mine, and always in the same remembered place. It’s a whale-backed hill overlooking Morecambe Bay, and the season is never anything but spring. I’d been living in the north of England when I first saw him. Having a few days off work, and feeling restless in the unfurling days of May, I traveled by train to the coast. Morecambe Bay is a vast and changeable terrain on the edge of Cumbria where water and sand verge on the indivisible, trading natures throughout the night and day. At low tide the sand ripples into the distance until the far ribbon of sea glis- tens and shines like the lights of an island. There is nothing solid about this coastal composition; the bay is constantly shifting, unsettled in its essence. When the sea begins its return it infiltrates the sand, slipping between acres of grains and sparking alchemical processes as it goes. My train slowed above a sweep of red-streaked mud, crossing the causeway that spans the northern end of the bay. I found a room for the night in an odd, neo-gothic hotel in

the quiet retirement town of Grange-over-Sands. Despite be-

is l ou N ris t i m ing lodged at the far end of the top, turreted floor, I seemed Di to be the only guest haunting the long hallways. After dinner I asked the owner if he could recommend a walk for the following day. He seemed pleased with the possibility for conversation and showed me obligingly to an mystery of his disappearance. And at odd and unforeseen armchair in the lounge. Some minutes later he returned car- I’ve sometimes asked myself how moments—talking with friends over wine, sowing seeds in rying a bottle of single malt cradled in his hand, two clinking the garden, reading by the fire—I find him slipping easily glasses, and a map. Over the course of the evening, and the often we enter the lives of strang- into my company. The image of him walking the sunlit hills diminishing whiskey, he proposed a number of routes, but ahead of me arises, locking into place like a closing door. one struck me as particularly appealing. It began at the edge ers, where we’re recollected from But during these unexpected visits I remember that he’s al- of town, where a ridge of rounded hills could be walked in time to time without our know- ways there, not coming and going via the door, but at home one of two directions. If I made my way east, the owner told within. He’s taken up residence in my memories. me, I could cut down one of the side valleys to a village pub ing. Is each of us accounted for in What fascinates me about the man on the hill, however, serving home-brewed ales. In the glow of the late-evening is not who he was or where he went—though I confess to an whiskey his suggestion settled the matter with ease. the life of another, held there in unresolved curiosity on both fronts—but the nature of our I left the hotel early, spring light beginning to skim the memory like the man on the hill is relationship. Strangers can pass into significance after brief, bay. Gulls arrowed over the seafront and the first of the day’s nearly intangible encounters, courtesy of crossed paths and therapeutic strolls started up along the promenade. I soon in mine? shared situations, a tenuous glance across a rain-scented found the edge of town and felt the keen tingle that comes street, a lit window revealing a midnight smile, an overheard with walking in springtime. A dry stone wall crept up an em- conversation that lingers after leaving. I’ve sometimes asked erald meadow and I followed its stride. It might have been paths were entwined in this way, this ebb and flow, this rise myself how often we enter the lives of strangers, where there for centuries, yet its stones had stayed true to their pre- and fall, constant as the sea’s slow advancing seep. we’re recollected from time to time without our knowing, cise and allotted sockets, as if the wall had pushed through The distance between us gradually lessened. I’d closed unaware, even, of the circumstances of our exchange. Is the earth intact. Wildflowers unfolded with the morning, tiny the gap until I was near enough to make out the man’s limp each of us accounted for in the life of another, held there in dabs of promise scattered over the swelling green sward. A more clearly. He had to hitch his left leg, as if to swing it memory like the man on the hill is in mine, conjured from salt breeze stole up behind me and I glimpsed it disappearing over a tangle of barbed wire, before he could steer it behind the thin spring air like a lost counterpart or spiritual sibling, into the meadow grass, riffling through like a village rumor. the other. Over the years his hair had thinned a little on top a suggestion of life’s myriad turns never taken? We brush Somewhere on the way up I turned to look back. The so that it hung in a dark disc above his ears. But the most against one another with the ease of a wind—occasionally pewter and blue wash of Morecambe Bay shimmered away striking aspect of his appearance was his black suit, matched traces must catch. from me. It was mid-tide, so that much of the sands were by a pair of polished shoes: it seemed to react to the sun, still exposed, or glazed with a translucent, sunburst sheen. radiating a dark luminescence as if lit from within. The man From high above I could make out the various patterns in- walked the furrowed hills alone, distinguished by sunlight. Some years ago I traveled from scribed by an earlier incursion. Strange codes encrypted the And I followed his every shining step. Greece to Romania by train. After hours of indecision I shore: tide pools like blue eyes; long serrated reefs; cirques I watched him slope into the next hollow, disappear- finally choose W. G. Sebald’s book The Emigrants as my opening here and there. The waterscape entranced, the whole ing from view in the usual way, like a seabird sliding from companion for the long journey. The Emigrants is a beauti- bay mimicking a minor archipelago. But its appearance was a crest. But this time he didn’t surface; the sun-washed fully haunting work. In it Sebald sketches four dislocated deceptive—over time the bay had claimed many lives, those grasses rippled without him where I’d expected his ascent. lives and guides us through a minor compendium of their unable to compass their way back over the shifting, water- He must have finally tired, I reckoned, imagining him seated emigrant memories and intimate habits, their passions and filling sands. somewhere on the saddle, a white handkerchief dabbing his losses, their obsessions. Layer upon layer of detail is built I spun away from the bright bay and followed the stone brow. But there was no sign of him when a few minutes later into these stories, including black and white images—snap- wall that led me up the slope. When I reached the top I could I reached the saddle myself. Great swathes of open meadow shots of people, domestic interiors, postcards and portraits, see a range of hills strung out ahead of me. Each one rose fell away to either side. Dark trees and villages studded the ticket stubs and newspaper clippings—but there remains a and fell gently, as though surfacing for air. Wind and wild far valleys, but nothing stirred within sight. I scouted both small knot at the heart of each life that can’t be unraveled. grasses had bequeathed them a sinuous shape, unbroken by sides of the hollow and then combed the flanking slopes. I began the book as my train pulled out of Salonika boulders or trees. Where each hill fell away a smooth saddle I ran on to the lip of the next hill and looked back over near midnight. I read for a couple of hours before switch- held them together. Warmth filled the morning and a clear, the route we’d just traversed, seeing how it curled in the ing off the overhead lamp to drift in and out of sleep as the burnished glow drifted from the sky, layering the grassy distance toward the bright and shining sea. I turned around train sped up and then slowed, sped up and slowed, rat- swells in light. to scan the empty path that lay ahead of me, knowing it had tling through the dark countryside. By morning we were in Some way ahead of me I saw a man walking east. He been altered forever. The man was nowhere to be seen, and Sofia, and I returned to the book. Throughout the day, while leaned a little to one side, as though being aided by a cane. no sign of his passage lingered. He’d simply vanished into crossing the pale, late-winter plains of northern Bulgaria, Despite the distance that lay between us his presence was sunlight. watching the low light flare off the swirling brown water conspicuous atop the buckled ridge: nothing else broke the of the Danube River, and rumbling past the oil derricks of horizon of the hills and his clothes were the color of pitch. southern Romania, I fell deeper and deeper into the lives of The morning slowed while I walked, buoyed by the light, The man on the hill returns from the emigrants. But there was something else that caught my and the tender spring grasses gave way easily underfoot. time to time, as brightly lit in memory as on the hills above eye, and it reminded me of the man on the hill: an enigmatic Judging from his hesitant steps, and the distinctive black suit Morecambe Bay. In many ways he has changed the course stranger passes through each of the stories. he wore walking, I imagined the man in the distance was of my life. They may seem minor and insignificant abstrac- Vladimir Nabokov was both a well-known writer and a elderly, carrying the elegant airs of a more decorous time. tions, like inconsequential grains of sand let fall through noted lepidopterist, along with being an emigrant himself, Although following in his wake I had the sense that we were one’s hand, but together they carry a weight, a solidity that having left revolutionary Russia with his parents in 1919 walking the hills together, hoving in and out of view with keeps him grounded close by. for a life that eventually took him to England, Germany, the the dipping and rising of the ridges. When I surfaced from Each time I’m out walking and gain a hilltop ridge I United States and Switzerland. Sebald conjures Nabokov one of the saddles he would be sloping down the next. Our unthinkingly scan its length for a dark, perambulating figure, not as a famous author but rather as an ordinary, if magnetic, hoping he has come back to me. I’ve exhausted long hours and days of my life delving without consequence into the See distance page 6 Page 6 The Redwood Coast Review Fall 2010 distance from page 5 remotest impression of the strangeness of earlier in the day we would have stepped individual whose life briefly coincides with the apparition it referred to.” off without knowing. Had we emerged from those of the characters in the book. Staying Later a character recalls passing two Our beds were in fact our cabins at alternative times, or waited on true to the chronology and geography of the distinguished Russian gentlemen, “one the steps by the carriage doors to gain a few writer’s life, Nabokov appears as a ghostlike of whom was speaking seriously to a boy pushed together, separat- precious seconds on our fellow passengers, apparition, minor and easily unnoticed, but of about ten who had been chasing but- ed by only a thin, simple we would never have understood how there all the same, hovering like a translu- terflies,” while walking with friends in a closely our paths had crossed. Human lives cent presence, woven into these imagined German park in 1910. The man talking to wall. While the train had must be filled with such near misses. lives. the boy is recognized by one of the group as I took a last look in our cabins before Nabokov first appears near the begin- Sergei Muromtsev, who four years earlier coursed the dark coun- leaving and couldn’t help noticing how the ning of the book in a heavily shadowed, had been elected president of Russia’s first tryside we had slept as spaces were arranged differently. Vasillis’s black-and-white photograph, almost a parliament, the Duma. The other man is cabin was the mirror image of mine next silhouette. He is standing on a ridge in the Nabokov’s father, while the boy is Nabokov near as lovers, oblivious door, so that our beds were in fact pushed Swiss mountains, wearing a white hat tilted himself. It is a scene lifted directly from the together, separated by only a thin, simple back on his head and carrying a butterfly writer’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, but and dreaming. wall. While the train had coursed the dark net wedged beneath his right arm. What what Sebald has done is to imagine the other countryside we had slept as near as lovers, struck me about the photo was its strange lives intersecting at the same time, revealing oblivious and dreaming, lost to our own resemblance to the place where I’d last seen the scene from another angle. Later in life, While I stood at the open window arms secret worlds. the man on the hill. While Nabokov peers Sebald’s character returns to the image of suddenly clasped me about the waist, cinch- I stepped down from the train. The at something in the hazy distance, I found the young boy, durably stored away and still ing me tight. A rollicking laughter fluttered brakes hissed and water dripped to the oily myself staring at the eerily analogous back- shining, when she is proposed to by a man somewhere by my ear and I felt a trembling tracks. Engineers tapped the wheels with drop, a long sunken valley slipping away considered unsuitable by her father. In that fear rise within. But I swung round in panic metal rods, listening for the dull clang that from the ridge and studded with dark trees. moment, “though everything else around me to meet the face of a friend. For a few would reveal a crack. I joined the pas- In Nabokov’s later appearances he is blurred, I saw that long-forgotten Russian seconds the two of us stood rooted to our sengers clouding toward the exit, one of unnamed, and unknown to the characters boy as clearly as anything, leaping about the spots, smiling idiotically at each other until thousands radiating from the station into whose lives he enigmatically enters. A meadows with his butterfly net; I saw him I’d regained my calm. Then we embraced their lives throughout the city. I looked at woman recalls visiting a relative some thirty as a messenger of joy, returning from that deeply. the faces jostling around me, listened to years earlier in a sanatorium in Ithaca, New distant summer day.” The relic memory of Vasillis is Siberian, a wandering writer the unfamiliar tongue and wondered what York. She recollects looking through the a briefly seen stranger finds its place in her and painter who’d lived for some time in a connections might bind us, what threads patient’s window at the same moment that life again. Inexplicably entwined, their paths village close to mine in Greece. We hadn’t might unexpectedly tie together. Somewhere “a middle-aged man appeared, holding a converge a second time. The significance of seen each other for a few years and when amidst the gathering passengers might be a white net on a pole in front of him and occa- small moments is to be found in their span; our excitement finally settled down, I asked stranger whose memory would resurface at sionally taking little jumps.” Separated from our lives are fashioned from such accre- him if he’d just boarded the train. “No, I’ve some undetermined time. Or I might pass the incident by three decades, she retains tions. been on since Salonika,” he said. a face already seen, long ago, and in some this bright memory of a stranger who passed “In which carriage?” other place. I might recognize a limp, the briefly through her life. The patient follows “This one. That’s my cabin there.” Vasil- tang of the sea brought in on the wind, spy her gaze into the grounds of the sanatorium I took a break from reading lis turned to point to the sleeping compart- a black suit and polished shoes slipping and says, “It’s the butterfly man, you know. The Emigrants while crossing the southern ment next to mine. “Why? Where’s yours?” through the crowd, and at the last second He comes round here quite often.” plains of Romania. Opening the door to my he asked. I smiled and pointed to the see the sunlight being carried along, a dark In another of the stories a painter recalls cabin I stepped into a corridor of bright win- adjacent berth, and then we laughed and em- and electric eclipse, until it vanished into climbing a mountain above Lake Geneva dows. The sun was draining from the west- braced again in the rolling, sunset corridor. the coastal air. when “a man of about sixty suddenly ap- ern sky, laying a last wash of ochre light Like me Vasillis was traveling to Bu- peared . . . like someone who’s popped over the flatlands. Scattered oil derricks rose charest, but only long enough to change out of the bloody ground. He was carry- and fell into the distance, and the grasslands trains for the Black Sea coast. It was already ing a large white gauze butterfly net.” The spilled away like the sands of Morecambe dark when we pulled in, and he had barely painter is so struck by the appearance of Bay. I watched the landscape slip by, my minutes to catch his connection. Watching Julian Hoffman lives in northern Greece. this stranger that he applies his artistry to a thoughts wrapped up in Nabokov’s ghostly him dash madly down the corridor, and then His story “Ismail” placed second in the portrait, entitled Man with a Butterfly Net. appearances and the way the man on the hill weave through the convening crowds, I real- 2010 Carpe Articulum International Fiction The artist is ultimately dismayed by his still walked ahead of me despite the distance ized how easily we might have missed each Prize. (julianhoffman.wordpress.com) work, however, as it “conveyed not even the of so many years. other. If either of our destinations had been Fall 2010 The Redwood Coast Review Page 7 B i b l i o t e c a News, Views, Notes, Reviews, Reports and Exhortations from Friends of Coast Community Library

President’s Desk with evidence galore such as scales, seeds, Library lines and the grower’s own notebooks. Committing crimes in broad daylight is, of course, a very American way of pass- ing the time, and “renegade gardeners” Book and “guerilla farmers” take their place in a Film Feast rogues’ gallery of heroes that includes Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and the smugglers Laura Schatzberg Blowout and bootleggers who operated during the Prohibition against alcohol, which taught the nation almost nothing about prohibitions here were two or three movie the- Alix Levine of any kind. aters within walking distance of our Notebooks from the Emerald Triangle Tapartment in the Bronx. At about 10 years old I was allowed to go with a friend e’ve just completed the annual belongs to a tradition of outlaw literature. It’s the kind of book that Henry David to see a double feature on the weekend. Labor Day weekend book sale. Admission price was 25 cents and I had the This year, for the first time, the Thoreau, the author of Walden and Maine W Woods, would have written had he been a same amount for treats. My favorite was the sale took place in the library itself. For marijuana grower in the woods of Men- ice cream bonbons. I know I must have seen years volunteers have had to haul truck- tens of films over those early years but few loads of boxes of books down to the Gualala docino or Humboldt. Bradd’s book is about nature, woods, hills, and creatures including have remained in my memory. Community Center for the sale. (Thanks It was only when I was a teenager that to the Community Center for provid- owls and deer. Thoreau also had a cash crop, though his was beans. Like Walden, Note- movies became “film” and that film was the ing the space and the tables to set out our new wave explosion of avant-garde cinema wares.) Moving the sale to the library was books is about the little things that matter: Bill Bradd socks, hands, a cabin in the woods, and the that reached the US from Europe, India much easier on our volunteers’ bodies and and Japan. There were also many Ameri- their gasoline costs too, since it was only cats that inhabit the cabin. Bradd has a sharp eye for detail and an energetic prose style can films that are now seen as classics, and necessary to bring out the boxes of books many of them are now available on DVD. from workroom storage to set up our tables that carries the reader along. In one vivid Green passage near the start of the book, he writes, Our library has many films on VHS that of books. We are grateful to St. Paul’s have been donated, but DVDs are not being Methodist Church and the Redwood Coast “I always love preparing to go into the hills for the first time, getting out the knapsacks donated, maybe because they are not cum- Fire District in Manchester for lending long bersome to store and the quality does not folding tables to the library to display the Thumb and the water bottles, the medicine kit, find- deteriorate much. In any case, the Friends books for sale. ing the knife, dumping the old alder leaves into the compost, a spent band-aid, a dead have purchased classic DVDs to add to our In prior years the book sale has involved Jonah Raskin collection. a much larger number of books, too many wooden match, a used blue bandana, a very dead banana peel, a bottle of Vicks, and an For me, nothing is as captivating as my to even fit on the tables at the Community own imagination’s creation of the visuals for Center, leaving many to languish in open Notebooks from the Emerald Triangle: emergency candle.” Those details help, and Notes of a Renegade Gardener the book works well when the descriptions a well-written story. A close second, though, boxes under the tables, accessible only to is seeing the visuals and interpretation from the limber and dedicated shopper. Since in the Far Hills are vivid and the reflections are ground in by Bill Bradd the real. someone else’s imagination as translated last year’s sale, the Friends have been more to a screen. I prefer to finish reading the selective about which donations to keep in Ten Mile River Press (2010),136 pages Notebooks is about “money trees,” as he calls them, a phrase that seems apt and book before I see a film adaptation in order storage for the big annual sale. Outdated to have my vision firmly cemented in my man whose face is blurred that ought to remind just about everyone textbooks, tattered paperbacks, musty relics mind. Obviously, the best way to view film and unidentifiable graces the who lives in the Emerald Triangle and far of folks’ garage storage have always been is on the big screen at Arena Theater with cover of Bill Bradd’s heartfelt beyond, that writing about marijuana —pot, disposed of. However, after a chance to sell my current choice of snacks, organic pop- memoir, Notebooks from the weed, cannabis, dank, ganga, grass, and at the monthly mini-book sale and in the ki- corn with brewer’s yeast and salt. That is Emerald Triangle. The man whatever else one wants to call it—is a mat- osk around the clock column in the library, not always possible for movies that are not it is obvious some books are unsaleable, so Aon the cover might be Bradd himself; then currently running or have not been chosen again he might not be. Next to him are Notebooks belongs to disposing of them as we go along prevents by the film club. half-a-dozen leafy green marijuana plants. overcrowding in our storage room. Thus, Some films do not translate well to a I say marijuana but I’m not 100 percent a tradition of outlaw the smaller number of books and audiovi- small screen, like the recently shown Ran positive. If I could smell them and touch sual items made it possible to hold the sale literature. It’s the kind by Akira Kurosawa, one of Japan’s foremost them I would be far more certain about their in the library with everything in easy view directors. There are many, though, that are genus and species, and I might be able to of book that Thoreau and a more organized arrangement. fine to see in small format, and some of say whether they were sativa, indica or a Although the sale grossed more last the classics can be viewed again and again cross. Not everything is what it seems to be would have written had year, expenses took a big bite out of our and the repetition only serves to refresh our in marijuana land. net. This year we cleared about $1450, he been a marijuana enjoyment. Watching DVDs from the library Some years ago, I worked on a Hol- slightly more than last year. Unfortunately, in the comfort of one’s home is not without lywood movie about marijuana growers grower in the woods of and not surprisingly, book sale earnings other benefits. The bottom line is that there entitled Homegrown that stared Billy Bob have been down for the past year or so. At is no cost involved, unless you return them Thornton, Hank Azzaria, Kelly Lynch and Mendocino. the same time, expenses continue to rise as late and accrue a fine. Additionally, your others. The producer paid tens of thousands the Friends of Coast Community Library snacks can be as unique as your pantry and of dollars for artificial plants made from silk ter of nomenclature. The words and phrases (FoCCL) take over payment for items that fridge contents; your attire and appearance and bamboo. On the screen, they looked real used to describe the plant at the heart of budget cuts no longer allow the County Li- need only be presentable to yourself, and but up-close and on the set it was obvious the underground economy say a great deal brary to pay for. Friends groups are taking when you watch them is entirely up to you. that they were as fake as the bogus falcon about where one stands on the issue of on this burden at all the County branches. Films are an integral part of our culture in The Maltese Falcon. That same producer legalization, for example—which is on the Accordingly, FoCCL is looking for new through language, sound and story. Film wanted everyone connected to the movie to ballot in November. The words and phrases ways to raise funds to keep Coast Commu- plots, movie music and famous lines are so say they were genuine, and I wouldn’t go also suggest how and why one is connected nity Library operating smoothly. iconic that a mere hint will make an associa- along with that request. to the shadow economy itself. To some it’s I believe CCL has the largest group of tion common to most people. Revisiting the Bill Bradd knows marijuana land from first and foremost a plant; to others it’s a dedicated volunteers of any library in our classics can refresh your popular culture the inside out. He also knows the fine line drug; to still others a sacred herb. Of course, county. Without our volunteers we would vocabulary and improve your crossword that separates the real from the unreal. Am- it’s also a commodity that’s bought and sold not have our library. So many signed up to puzzle success rate. biguity and mystery tug at his imagination, or bartered for goods and services. Even help with the Labor Day book sale, either The new DVDs are flying off the shelves, and in Notebooks from the Emerald Triangle growers who love their trees and see them in setting up, taking down, cashiering, baking so you may have to request them. A few of he presents a mystery story whose roots all their beauty and majesty often can’t help refreshments, creating signage and so forth the films I have never seen, like Gone with are tangled up in ambiguity. Nowhere does but calculate how much money they’ll bring that we were able to save hours of volun- the Wind, but I have seen clips from it so he come out and say point-blank, “I grew after the harvest. teer time and effort as many hands made I am sure it will seem familiar. I plan to marijuana.” Most criminal defense lawyers quick work of the job. We value every watch some of my favorites again and see would pat him on the back for his caution. radd calls them “money trees” right bit of volunteer help, whether it involves how they hold up. The English Patient, Gos- After all, the possession, sale, transportation Bfrom the start, and all the way through a regular work schedule at the circulation ford Park, Kiss of the Spider Woman, One and use of marijuana are illegal by federal his book, which for my money makes him desk, book processing in the work room, Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Raging Bull, law. Since 1970, there have been more than a trustworthy storyteller, though I don’t providing food for events, setting up classes Thelma & Louise and Some Like It Hot are 20,000,000 arrests for violations of the trust him 100 percent. “I never made any and so much more. Everything that happens all cinema classics that, in my opinion, bear marijuana laws in the United States—and money,” he writes. “I just loved being in the at CCL is the result of our neighbors’ and seeing again. There are some titles I never mostly just for possession. So confessing hills, but even so I don’t go back no more.” friends’ support in so many ways. heard of—Dance with a Stranger, Celebra- to crimes involving cannabis, as it is now Maybe he really did not make money. Still, Special thanks go to Laura Ishimaru who tion, The Butcher Boy, Heathers and Henry increasingly called, could lead to an arrest it would be unwise to boast about profits has been the book sale chairperson for years Fool—I was probably out of the country or and a possible conviction. made in the illegal marijuana trade. More- and was the originator of the monthly mini- out of the loop when they came out. You Bradd says that you have to be insane to over, once a grower, it’s difficult not to con- book sales, which have been a boon to our may find that flipping through the DVD rack be a marijuana grower. “You cannot invent tinue to be a grower, and difficult not to go budget by providing some regular income will reveal an unexpected old friend or a this kind of crazy,” he writes. ”You got back after a break. The money beckons as each month. After years of tireless work, new experience from film history. to be crazy for a long time.” I would add well as the adventure, and the feeling of be- Laura is retiring from her labors on behalf To see a list of our DVDs in the catalog, especially crazy if the growing is outdoors, longing to an extended outlaw family that’s of FoCCL for a well-deserved rest . do an advance search and select the limits visible to helicopters, and in direct sunlight. making history. Growers become addicted Coast Community and Video DVD. Put in Growing marijuana in the Emerald Triangle to the lifestyle, as Bradd seems to have done the title keyword, the letter A. Some of the —Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity coun- for a few seasons. I wouldn’t blame him if Volunteer results may be missing or lost but most of ties—and all over Northern California, as he did go back. Call Laura or Terra at 882.3114 to join them are either in our stacks or available for Bradd apparently did for years, means com- our team at Coast Community Library. request. mitting a felony in broad daylight and often See green page 8 Happy viewing. Page  The Redwood Coast Review Fall 2010 green from page 7 books had illustrated Fig’s memoir. So Norris called Fig and got herself an invitation to Near the end of his inspired account, he a party Fig was throwing for his famous writes that “the adventures in this book were friend, Norman Mailer. not unique to me. Other woods workers Lion Queen Norris had been divorced for one year. had adventures and stories. This is just my She didn’t want another husband. The only version.” True enough; thousands of men A Ticket to the Circus serious man in her life was her son, Matt. and women have grown marijuana in the by Norris Church Mailer She dated and slept with several men. One Emerald Triangle over the past 40 years. Random House (2010), 399 pages was Bill Clinton. She was impressed by his Many of them have exciting tales to tell intelligence and charisma. She was positive about their encounters with the law and with orman Mailer was 83 in the final he was going to be president someday. thieves. But most of them haven’t com- summer of his life in 2007 and hav- Norman and Norris ended up having

mitted their stories to paper and published

ien l

Ning an enormous amount of trouble K . dinner. They ended up making love. They

E them. Bradd has and that makes him an both walking and breathing. During that t ended up making a life together, and she

uncommon woods worker. time, he often told his wife of 27 years, Nor- became stepmother to all those children.

er b o He is an uncommon writer—unromantic ris Church Mailer, “When I’m gone and you R Norris’s son Matt also became a Mailer, and clear-sighted, though he also writes write about me, I want you to say . . . ” And Norman and Norris Church Mailer and all nine children would gather for sev- poetically, and in a kind of stream-of-con- her response was always the same. “No, As Norris memorably puts it in this eral weeks every summer in a huge house sciousness way befitting a “notebook” as I’m not going to write about you because no book, “I was no longer the tootsie; I was the in Provincetown, Massachusetts. They also this book claims to be. “This time on the one would believe it.” wife.” gathered in Maine. edge of my right ear, the ear I tug when I’m Norman Mailer was a literary lion. He Norman had left all his wives, including During the school year, the kids were off thinking about the river, the passage, the wrote 45 books. Norris was his sixth wife Carol, before any of their children were six with their various mothers while Norman water hawk’s search, the otter, the nest,” he and mother to his eighth child. The first years old. Norris knew this before she be- and Norris stayed in Brooklyn with the two writes eloquently. “This kind of stuff, trying seven were scattered among the previous came wife number six , and she talks about youngest boys. Norman wrote and traveled to weave it in, make it current, solve the wives. One of his books, The Armies of the it in this book. She attended many parties all over the world with Norris, who did puzzle of rent by understanding the angle of Night, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. in New York City with Norman, and she some modeling while she wrote two novels, drop, by keening the terror from above.” No Norman was 56 years old when he mar- writes, “Rude people—there are way too Windchill Summer and Cheap Diamonds. one else could possibly have written with ried Norris in 1980. She was 33 but had many rude people in this world—would ask, In spite of Norris’s vow to Norman that language, and that rhythm. been living with Norman for the past five ‘Which wife are you?’” that she was not going to write about him, Notebooks is one of a kind, and because years. By then, their son was two-and-a- Norris would answer, “The last one.” scenes from their life kept coming back it straddles a frontier that links the woods of half years old. She was absolutely sure that she and Nor- to her. So she did eventually write this oak and manzanita to the fabled woods of Marrying Norris was complicated. First, man would be together for the rest of their book, but it’s as much about her life as it the “money trees,” it will endure. In a rare Norman had to get a divorce from his fourth lives. And they were. is about the life they shared and the many moment of nearly full disclosure about his wife, Beverly. Then he had to marry Carol Norris was born and raised in Arkansas. famous people who wandered through: Lee crop and how he handled it after the harvest, to legitimize the daughter he had with Carol She met Norman when she was 26, and she Harvey Oswald, most of the Kennedy clan, Bradd writes, “I give each bud one snip. It (Maggie) while he was still married to Bev- had already been married and divorced and Budd Schulberg, Gloria Steinem, Gore came from the jungle, so it should look like erly. Maggie was 9 then, and Norman didn’t had a young son of her own. Matt was four Vidal, Andy Warhol, Imelda Marcos, Ryan the jungle, not some Ivy League haircut.” want her growing up knowing she was the then, the same age as Maggie. And Norris O’Neal, Ali McGraw, Tommy Lee Jones, Fortunately Bradd is no neat and tidy Ivy only one of his children whose mother had was the same age as Norman’s first child by Woody Harrelson, Fidel Castro, Francis Leaguer. His memoir is no ordinary garden- never been married to Norman Mailer. his first wife. And Norman was one year Ford Coppola, Russell Crowe, Oscar de la variety book either, but a wild narrative that Norman was living with Carol and older than Norris’ father. Renta, Gary Gilmore, Mikhail Gorbachev, takes readers down into the tangled under- Maggie when he met and wooed Norris. Things were already complicated. Muhammad Ali, Tennesse Williams and brush, and into the life of a crazy, beautiful, They immediately moved in together. The The two met in 1975. Norman, then 52, many others. sad, funny woods worker in the backcountry marriage to Carol, by prior agreement, only was on a lecture tour, and one of his old-sol- And, of course, Norman Mailer. that is our own big comic, tragic backyard. lasted for 24 hours. As soon as the Haitian dier buddies from World War II was teach- A Ticket to the Circus is a wonderful divorce papers arrived, Norman and Norris ing at a college in Little Rock, Arkansas. At memoir. The book is wise, blunt, self- had their wedding. the time, Norris was teaching art at a local aware, candid and as deeply moving as it is Jonah Raskin is the author of Field Days: A entertaining. Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine high school, and she knew Francis, who —Kit Knight in California. Norman fondly called “Fig.” In fact, Norris

Book Box Some Recent Arrivals at Coast Community Library Adult Books

Alphin, Elaine Marie. An unspeakable Damon, William. The path to purpose: Poe, Randy. Skydog: The Duane Allman Edwards, Pamela Duncan. Dinorella: a crime: the prosecution and persecu- helping our children find their calling story prehistoric fairy tale tion of Leo Frank in life Regan, Laura. Vanishing species: the wild- Emmett, Jonathan. She’ll be coming Anderson, Paul. Harvest the fire De Blasi, Marlena. That summer in Sicily: life art of Laura Regan ‘round the mountain Baker, Ian. The heart of the world: a a love story Ruhlman, Michael. The soul of a chef: the Gerrard, Roy. Mik’s mammoth journey to the last secret place De Lint, Charles. Someplace to be flying journey toward perfection Hague, Kathleen. Alphabears: an ABC Bielunski, Marlys. Skinny beef Erdrich, Louise. Shadow tag Scottoline, Lisa. Think twice book Buckingham, Marcus. First, break all Gibran, Kahlil. The broken wings Shalit, Willa. Life cast: behind the mask Hoberman, Mary Ann. The seven silly the rules: what the world’s greatest Giffin, Emily. Heart of the matter Shanley, Karen. Dogs of dreamtime: a story eaters managers do differently Goodkind, Terry. Stone of tears about second chances and the power of Jones, Lynda. Mrs. Lincoln’s dressmaker: Castillo, Linda. Pray for silence Goulding, Edwin. Fuchsias: the complete love the unlikely friendship of Elizabeth Cather, Willa. Willa Cather in Europe: guide Slater, Harrison Gradwell. Nightmusic Keckley & Mary Todd Lincoln her own story of the first journey Grippando, James. When darkness falls Sparks, Nicholas. The choice Keene, Carolyn. Uncivil acts Cleave, Chris. Little Bee Haag, Michael. Egypt Stein, Garth. Raven stole the moon Kenyon, Sherrilyn. Infinity Cole, Richard. Stairway to heaven: Led Hamilton, Geoff. The organic garden book Strout, Elizabeth. Olive Kitteridge Lobel, Arnold. Frog and Toad together Zeppelin uncensored Hannah, Sophie. The dead lie down Tatsumi, Yoshihiro. A drifting life London, Jonathan. Red wolf country Coll, Steve. The Bin Ladens: an Arabian Hawken, Paul. The magic of Findhorn Traunfeld, Jerry. The Herbfarm cookbook McFarland, Lyn Rossiter. Widget family in the American century Hendricks, Judith Ryan. The baker’s ap- Valdes, Zoe. La cazadora de astros Meadows, Daisy. Amy the amethyst fairy Coyne, John. The caddie who knew Ben prentice Vinge, Vernor. A deepness in the sky Numeroff, Laura Joffe. If you give a cat Hogan James, Theodore. The cut-flower garden Wilson, F. Paul. By the sword: a Repairman a cupcake Crace, Jim. The devil’s larder Johnson, Garth. 1000 ideas for creative Jack novel Offill, Jenny. 17 Things I’m not allowed Cunningham, Annalisa. Gentle yoga for reuse: remake, restyle, recycle, renew Wissinger, Joanna. Metalwork and silver to do anymore healing: mind, body, spirit Katz, Jon. A dog year: twelve months, four Wright, Janet. Reflexology and acupressure: Pullman, Philip. Lyra’s Oxford dogs, and me pressure points for healing Roy, Ron. The empty envelope Kogan, Deborah Copaken. Between here York, Taylor. Mendocino: a novel of people Ryan, Pam Munoz. Mice and beans and April and politics Simon, Francesca. Horrid Henry’s stink- Krenov, James. The impractical cabinet- Zahn, Timothy. Conquerors’ legacy bomb Library Hours maker Sloane, Eric. A museum of early Ameri- Lackey, Mercedes. Storm rising can tools Monday 12 noon - 6 pm Levy, Shawn. The last playboy: the high Juvenile Books Spires, Elizabeth. I heard God talking to Tuesday 10am - 6 pm life of Porfirio Rubirosa me: William Edmondson and his stone Wednesday 10am - 8 pm Lowe, John. Japanese crafts Aylesworth, Jim. Old black fly carvings Thursday 12 noon - 8 pm Mero, Laszlo. Moral calculations: game Ayo, Yvonne. Africa Waber, Bernard. Ira sleeps over theory, logic, and human frailty Balian, Lorna. Mother’s Mother’s Day Yolen, Jane. How do dinosaurs go to Friday 12 noon - 6 pm Michaels, Fern. The marriage game Bluemle, Elizabeth. How do you wokka- school Saturday 12 noon - 3 pm Miller, Sue. The senator’s wife wokka? Young, Karen Romano. Cobwebs Moore, Gina. The window style bible Brumbeau, Jeff. The quiltmaker’s gift Zolotow, Charlotte. William’s doll Coast Community Library Mortenson, Greg. Stones into schools: pro- Christopher, Matt. Double play at short is located at moting peace with books, not bombs in Collins, Suzanne. Mockingjay 225 Main Street Afghanistan and Pakistan Crews, Donald. Sail away Point Arena Oster, Maggie. Culinary herbs Cronin, Doreen. Giggle, giggle, quack (707) 882-3114 Fall 2010 The Redwood Coast Review Page 

Unsolved Mystery Pamela Malone

Conrad in Beverly Hills characters never even attain existence on the by Jake Fuchs page, which feels inauthentic. Raw Dog Screaming Press (2010), 263 pages Fuchs is at his best This novel would have been better if it portraying teenage had been either a more consistent literary he eponymous character fiction, or a straightforward memoir. Two of Conrad in Beverly Hills angst. He is superb at books that cover similar terrain, Jonathan often says that he is “flum- Schwartz’s memoir All in Good Time, and moxed,” which is exactly how catching that mixture Delia Ephron’s autobiographical novel I felt reading this book. My of inarticulate clueless- Hanging Up, both take place in Beverly Tquandary was, what was I reading? Was it Hills and involve abusive or neglectful an autobiographical novel, a fictionalized ness, awkward, con- fathers who wrote for the movies. But there memoir, a pulp fiction detective story, or a is a consistent authenticity in these books satirical novel poking fun at academia? It fused sexuality, and which is not evident in Conrad in Beverly was all of the above, which caused a certain bizarre acting out. Hills, as the writer swings from serious to confusion for me as a reader. satire, memoir to noir. The premise is that Conrad Keppler, a Just as in his story At a certain point, the book turns into college professor, is obsessed and haunted a detective novel in which the professor by his difficult relationship with his father, “Why I’m Thinking is pursuing clues to unlock his repressed the screenwriter Morse Keppler. In order About Ed,” Fuchs nails memories. A poster from one of his father’s to deal with the psychic pain that persists movies shows up with a slutty woman, after his father’s death, Conrad writes a it when speaking from Bellana, on the cover. He finds an unmailed memoir in which he remembers a campaign letter from his now-deceased father, asking he embarked on at age 12 to get his father the teenage heart. Conrad to finish an unfinished story Morse to stop writing film scripts and switch to attempted to write describing his son’s ill- serious fiction. fated campaign. This part of the book was To confuse matters more, the public- of inarticulate cluelessness, awkward, a page turner, as clues mounted, and my ity that came with the review copy of the confused sexuality, and bizarre acting out. own imagination ran wild as I tried to guess needed attention from Morse. This cam- Just as in his short story “Why I’m Think- what traumatic event had happened to the book protests too much, that the book is not paign comes off a little false. If the boy was autobiographical, while devoting much at- ing About Ed” [RCR, Fall 2007], Fuchs boy regarding his father’s writing for the a nuisance when his father was writing film nails it when speaking from the teenage movies. Did he catch his father in a com- tention to the fact that Jake Fuchs is the son scripts, why would it be any different if his of Daniel Fuchs, who wrote three serious heart. There’s a humorous scene when he’s promising position with one of the bimbos father were writing serious fiction? masturbating with his only friend, a possibly that often showed up at the house, perhaps novels about Brooklyn life before moving The boy is embarrassed by the way his out to Beverly Hills and writing film scripts. gay youth whom everyone else shuns, and a Bellana? Was the scene in the Valley a clue father fawns on movie producers, all of very stunning scene when his father tries to that the father wrote for the burgeoning I had never heard of Daniel Fuchs, but after whom looked alike to the boy, whom he reading the accompanying material, I was fix him up with an awkward girl, daughter porn industry? That might have explained dubbed “The Irvings.” of a director. Unfortunately, these vividly Conrad’s ambivalence towards sexuality. certain this was fictionalized autobiography. There’s a not-so-subtle antisemitism The novel deals with the pain an emo- told scenes are too few and far between in However, alas, there is no mystery to be expressed when it comes to Conrad’s the novel. solved. The book ends where it started. tionally abusive parent can cause. From description of the people in the movie busi- the time Conrad was a baby, the father’s Conrad sits down at the computer, in what ness. This brings up an interesting theme oo much of the time, the first-person was once his father’s house, and begins to attitude was, get him out of here. This was that could have been developed further, because Conrad made too much noise when Tnarrator’s voice sounds like a patient write. Instead of writing the memoir we are regarding Jewish identity. Conrad doesn’t in a long-drawn-out therapy session. This reading, he writes a corny screenplay with a his father was writing. Add to this a mother know he is Jewish, and only finds out when whose role was to shush the boy up, and it’s was my own observation before the narrator fantasy Walton-like happy ending for father the other kids tease him for showing up at himself, Conrad the professor, remarks: and son. clear the only child had a lonely existence. school on Yom Kippur. Later he will be at This is made most poignant in a rare lyrical “But what then, was I writing? What kind Writers often go back to the same mate- the other end of an antisemitic slur on the of thing? Why should I work? It’s just rial. Given his gift for capturing what it’s moment, when Conrad envies the weeping part of an Irish, has-been actor who has willow tree in his backyard. therapy, isn’t it?” like to be a confused teenage boy, and his been a friend and surrogate father figure to There is a perceived lack of distance appealing sense of humor, I hope Jake Fuchs “That was quite a tree we had . . . What the teenage Conrad. Morse Keppler, having I should have envied was that willow tree, from the subject matter. Perhaps a third- will revisit this material someday, either in grown up in hardscrabble Brooklyn bullied person narrator would have provided the the form of the short story, which he writes because, though trapped in our backyard, by Irish gangs, thought he was sparing his it still enjoyed life. It never seemed to be writer a route to more insight and objectiv- so well, or perhaps as a straightforward son from antisemitism by not telling him he ity. While the character of Conrad is beauti- memoir, written with the insight this novel weeping about anything. It exuded health, was Jewish. But as Conrad ironically puts like a big strong man.” fully fleshed out, the father, mother and two unfortunately lacks. it, he’s Jewish anyway, whether he identifies girlfriends remain two-dimensional, almost Meanwhile, Conrad is a boy without with it or not. friends, a misfit, who becomes obsessed cartoon figures. We are told the professor is Fuchs is at his best portraying teenage divorced and has two daughters, but these Pamela Malone lives in Leonia, New Jersey, with his campaign to stop his father from angst. He is superb at catching that mixture writing film scripts—perhaps to get some and writes from time to time for the RCR. readers’ letters

Egregious mistake on Schreiner’s walls are among the rarest S U B S C R I B E in the world: an endangered Grevy’s zebra; I am both dismayed and saddened to see a blesbok, which were hunted nearly to If you live beyond the Redwood Coast and don’t get the Independent Coast extinction; an oryx, some species of which Carolyn Cooke’s piece, “Fixing the Trim- Observer, now you can subscribe to The Redwood Coast Review and not miss mer,” on the front page of yesterday’s RCR are extinct in the wild. [Summer 2010]. The piece glorifies trophy What does Cooke see in the story of an issue of our award-winning mix of essays, reviews, poetry, fiction and hunting, a “sport” akin to baby harp seal Merle Schreiner? We never really find out. graphic art. For $24 a year you will be guaranteed quarterly first-class de- bashing. Cooke’s naive infatuation/bad While her profile deliberately steers clear livery of the RCR and at the same time support Coast Community Library judgment is her cross to bear; your mistake, of judgment she also ignores the moral as the editor who chose to run this piece consequences of his actions. The reader in its ongoing operating expenses. Please use this coupon to subscribe and place it so prominently, is the more searches in vain for any hint of compassion or renew now. You won’t be disappointed. egregious. for his victims, at least one of whom was killed while drinking at a watering hole. Dorothy Ruef (Some sport.) Cooke seems to have more Yes, I want to subscribe to The Redwood Coast Review. I am Gualala feeling for her weed whacker than for the stolen lives of the animals whose remains enclosing a check for $24 to Coast Community Library. are displayed in Merle Schreiner’s grisly “museum.” Moral vacuity I am making an additional donation to the library in the Tai Moses amount of $______. I have long admired Carolyn Cooke’s writ- Oakland ing in the RCR for its lyrical sensitivity to Total enclosed $______the rhythms of the natural world. That’s why I was mystified by the moral vacuity of her recent essay about trophy hunter Merle Name ______Schreiner. Cooke portrays Schreiner as a humble WRITE TO US Address ______fixit-man who kindly gives her a behind-the- The RCR welcomes your letters. scenes tour of his hobby, big game hunting. Write to the Editor, RCR c/o But his humility is disingenuous. Trophy City, State, ZiP ______hunting is by its very nature an intensely ICO, P.O. Box 1200, Gualala, competitive and ego-driven activity. It’s CA 95445 or by email to about setting records; bagging the biggest, [email protected]. the wildest, the scarcest. That’s why some Copy or clip this coupon and send, with check or money order, to Coast of the animals whose severed heads hang Community Library, PO Box 808, Point Arena, CA 95468. Thank You! Page 10 The Redwood Coast Review Fall 2010 fair from page 1

They rushed through the gates, past the guards standing back and letting them roam free, letting them spread across the grounds until the whole fair seemed a tempest of hip-hop children bouncing around with a vehemence absent in the others. “Motherfucking bitch!” Anthems of neglect pierced the night air. Furrowed brows challenged the world to say something, anything, back. Perpetual squints sized up the enemy that might be you. Clenched fists and relentlessly moving mouths reinforced toughness. It wasn’t fake, it was real. Danger bobbed along with the mob. “Fuck him up!” “I say I’ll beat his ass!” “What he say?” “Nothing.” We stood by the bathrooms mesmerized. They passed in front of us jawing their concerns. “Fuck him.” “That bitch don’t know…” We walked on. Behind us the fair streamed in violently bright colors. People screamed on rides and barkers kept up a patter. “Did you see those two kids,” my mother said, once we got outside. “Yeah, I did! The two nerds?” “Yeah,” my aunt laughed with us.

The Big Fresno Fair Pooling their money at the entrance, two nerds had lurked, one white kid and one Chicano, wearing the right clothes the wrong way. They reminded me of me. “Cholos.” of colorful bulbs and screams. He banged his fists on the “Do we have enough to get in?” “Ay, Fresno.” stroller. “Count it, fool! We might have to break in!” My kid walked around and amused us, Ben in his tod- “Time to eat!” “That would be crazy!” dling days. We marveled at him. The usual fair food on our laps satisfied our hunger, “Sometimes you have to do things anarchic.” Fall hung in the air. The scent of the fields drifted into topped by a fair sweet we ate silently and happily. “Shall we “Retro juvenile you mean.” our living room. If it wasn’t true, if what really came in walk around some more?” “Whatever.” They plotted their mischief. It meant find- sounded much like LA, cars streaming on a major boule- “Let’s do it!” I popped up and led the way. ing a way in and capitalizing on it. vard less than a mile away and no particular scent but crisp We explored the hall with the gems and flowers. “Wow, It meant capitalism was your tool, not your master. It autumn, you could imagine it, this Fresno. You could see it look at this, pretty, huh?” I pointed into a case of glistening meant having fun. all, campesinos working the rows and rich, ripe fruit piling rocks and rare minerals. “I accede to your plan, dumb ass!” up on the ground. Fresno was enchanted and great. “Shall we go see the cows?” “Fuckface!” We loved Fresno. Nobody complained, really. “Let’s go see the cows.” We moved on next door to the “Did you hear them?” my aunt asked. On the third day of the stay, my mom made a suggestion. livestock in the pens. We gazed into the eyes of the cows, “Some of it.” “Let’s go to the fair!” She spotted the ad in the newspa- waiting for answers. When they gave none, just lay in per. A bunch of grapes clung under a trellis that spelled bovine majesty amid stacks of hay gazing back, chewing, we out FRESNO. We prepared to go, my wife staying home laughed. We headed outside again. “There they go, to spend their because she had to teach that night (“the damn university Brightly and lively as ever, the fair whirled and buzzed. doesn’t give me a life!”), and my son buckled in for the My kid pointed to a ride, and we put him in a big orange money!” My mother, the cynic, drive—strapped into his car seat, secured in the back. “Have fish, watching him go round. didn’t believe in carnival fun fun!” “Hey, Benny! Go, Benny!” We ran around with him, “We will!” We backed out of the driveway. smiling. for the poor. She thought they We caught the freeway and drove through industry to the He laughed his head off. Big Fresno Fair. “Okay, let’s go home now!” We adjusted him in his were dumb for spending their The fairgrounds are on the southeast side of town, a stroller and paused on the concourse, watching the people. hard-earned cash so fast. neighborhood of its own, tough and proud. The streets are “There they go, to spend their money!” My mother, dark at night, the houses adequately maintained tract homes the cynic, didn’t believe in carnival fun for the poor. She with sloping patio roofs jutting out of the back, and nicely thought they were dumb for spending their hard-earned cash tended lawns. An occasional eyesore blights the block. so fast. “What were they saying?” “I think Ron lives here,” my mom said, referring to the “On nothing, nothing.” On the midway, she had provided “That they’re going to get in free and be bad, bad boys.” Ron I never met, Fresno Ron, a distant relative. a running commentary. We all started laughing, watching them skirt the entrance Cousin Ron. They knew him better. But the midway had struck me as beautiful. Work- to another side of the fair. “Around here, somewhere.” ing people blowing some steam with restraint and dignity They disappeared into the shadows. A thug group ap- “He does, doesn’t he?” my aunt said. We stopped in the heartened me. A farmworker pitched dimes to impress his proached us. middle of the block. It looked like an LA street, a street in novia standing off to the side biting her lip with the turns of “Then I told that bitch I don’t need no shit from you. Rosemead, in Montebello, in any of the places we lived. his fortune. He threw the coins until he won a vase grand Know what I’m saying?” Alhambra. Pico Rivera. It could have been my old neigh- enough to satisfy him and present to her. Whole families “Fuck that bitch. Look at them bitches over there. Who borhood, with an extra sadness. An extra couple of decades carted stuffed animals bigger than any of them, and beamed. those fools with them? They mad dogging us?” weighing it down made the difference. Old couples rekindled romance just walking around holding “Hurry up, Stephen,” my mother said, elbowing me. Cousin Ron was not to be found. hands. The fair atmosphere worked on me. “This place is too rough for me.” “He’s probably sleeping anyway, let’s go to the fair.” Cholos sauntered past the booths with girlfriends cling- “Yeah, it’s kind of rough, Steve,” my aunt said, whisper- ing to them, but dove into a game on the sudden, pulling ing under her breath. We had reached the parking lot and he Ferris wheel circled in the night, brightly lit, neon out wads of cash from baggy pockets. They acted nice were crossing the street soon. Tstreaks staying. I like fairs, the sights and sounds, the and friendly towards the world. Bikers strolled the lanes, “It is,” I said. “And where were your Mexicans, Mom?” excitement of it all. I like the rides whirring around me, longhaired, pointy bearded guys taking dollars out of their “Everywhere,” she said, “spending their hard earned and the people relaxing for a bit, and the games promising chained wallets and throwing some on the numbers to im- money, like fools.” a small happiness. I enjoyed myself, walking around with press their ladies. Nobody warred. “But having a good time,” my aunt said. my aunt and mom, Ben flinging his arms out in the stroller, The Big Fresno Fair calmed. Peace entered into the “Having a good time, I guess,” my mom said. “But those wide-eyed and amazed. night, and anybody caught stupid would be thrown out. kids of theirs, this new generation, ay, what are we gonna “Hey, Son, look at that!” I squatted down and pointed at Cops patrolled the grounds. On walkie-talkies, security kept do?” The Octopus twirling in the night. It was a writhing mass in constant touch. A recent stabbing in Fresno wouldn’t ruin “Nothing,” I said. “Wait until the poets arise and make it. Mellow blacks from the Westside blended in. sense of them.” It was time to go home. “Will they come from them?” “Let’s go home now, okay?” “Never,” I said, “they’ll come from the ones who talk “Vamos, before it gets too cold.” We bundled ourselves up. straight.” dead from page 1 “My God, what is that?” My mother asked, approaching “And wear their pants up to their waists,” my aunt said, the gate with caution. stopping at the car and laughing. She imitated the two nerds The dinosaur is extinct. Yes I know, the seeds are lost. “I don’t know, Jo, but let’s get out of here.” back there talking. It must be a bit grim for a dinosaur to celebrate the cycle of “Look at the Ferris wheel,” I said, “it’s still spinning.” I life and death. But at least he has a skeleton. As they say tanding under the banners announcing the fair, in the far- unbuckled my kid in his stroller and began to put him in his on the day of the dead, he who was never born can never be Sreaching parking lot on the other side of the turnstiles, a car seat. a skeleton. Not have a skeleton but be a skeleton. It’s an new crowd had materialized, as if by premeditation showing “Hey you Mister Ben,” I told him. important distinction. A word can make a difference and so itself as one. The hip-hop generation, mostly Mexican kids, He waved a fist at me. can a punctuation mark. Commas are important. Com- Chicanos, but enough blacks and whites among them to I put it in my mouth and bit it. “Learn to speak around mas separate the essential from the nonessential. If I say make it interesting, entered the fairgrounds. “Hey, mother- your fist. Don’t mumble.” my uncle who died last year made a delicious jambalaya, I fucker, what you doing here? Bitch?” “What are you talking about there,” my mom said. She don’t use commas because that’s how you know which uncle They amassed on the concourse, sizing up the scene after was standing beside me at the door. I’m talking about. But if I say John Smith, who died last a thorough pat-down search by a security detail enlarged “Everything,” I said, “important to me.” year, was a good hockey player, I do use commas because for them. They stared and scowled. They wore oversized The kid laughed. I kissed his hand and gave it back to who died last year is not essential to the sentence even if it jeans hanging off their butts and white tee shirts advertising him. Lights swirled and whirled behind us. The Ferris is essential to John Smith. I’m afraid I’m confusing you. companies in bright letters. They seemed dazed by their wheel turned. Why don’t you write now from the point of view of your own craze. skeleton? “Get you out of the way, bitch,” to whomever. Grunts back established a communication system. They Stephen D. Gutierrez won a 2010 American Book Award for moved on. his collection of stories Live from Fresno y Los (Bear Star But more came in. They came and they came, hordes Hilda Johnston lives in Berkeley and teaches in Oakland. Press). He teaches at California State University, East Bay. of kids looking so severely disconnected they scared you. This is his first appearance in the RCR.